Nintendo

I said this in another thread, but Nintendo doesn't change shit up for no reason. People look at their consoles and go "Oh! Nintendo just tries crazy stuff and sees what hits. Then moves on to the next crazy thing." But that's not really what they do. Consoles were not stable at first and didn't have regular gaming conventions. So many many companies were just trying any idea that popped into their heads. And most failed and disappeared. Nintendo just had a pile of reserve cash for failures and also tended to have a different thing at the time that was succeeding. But if you focus instead on their handhelds rather than consoles, they have been wildly consistent. GB -> GBA was all reverse compatible. That was from 1989 to 2004. So each iteration gave a decent reason to upgrade, but you also were able to continue playing your game collection you built. Then, the DS had GBA support, the 3ds had DS support. And these were all pretty successful devices.

Nintendo didn't change much from NES to SNES, because NES was successful. Then when they had a bunch of new competition and things were obviously moving into a 3D direction, they took a swing with the N64 to some success, but not enough to keep Sony from becoming a real consistent player. GC failed so they decided to try something different instead of competing on the performance side of things. And the Wii succeeded. And they didn't change much with the next console. However, they also didn't change enough... like the fucking name. So people didn't even realize it was a new console. So it failed. And then they took what succeeded (handhelds) and added it to the other thing that succeeded (Wii ideas -- don't compete on performance, compete with unique games and features). I'll be honest. I expected the Switch to fail with its huge launch library of 1 game, but I am really glad it didn't. I also don't think Nintendo has a big reason to change the system too much. Add power and exclusive games to the new system but have reverse compat. People will have a reason to upgrade without feeling like they will be ditching something that they spent a lot of money on (like literally every handheld iteration they have had outside of the game and watch).

I could see them wishing they had a separate handheld and console again just for security purposes (when GC failed, they had the GBA succeeding, WiiU and 3DS, hell even the DS was moving over a million units a year during the WiiU era). But I don't see how they justify doing it. Either turn switch into their primary handheld line and make a newer handheld that has reverse compat along with a console, but what does this console offer? I cannot see them getting into the performance game again with PS and Xbox being so far ahead in terms of hardware and games library. Give a system with maybe the power of an XBox One that can be handheld and supports 4K on the TV and 1080 in the hand and can finally run pokemon Violet at a decent fps. Make money.